Evolution myths: Natural selection is the only means of evolution

Take a look in the mirror. The face you see is rather different from that of a Neanderthal. Why? The answer could be genetic drift. With features such as the shape of your skull, which can vary in form with little change in function, chance might play a bigger role in evolution than natural selection.

DNA is under constant attack from chemicals and radiation, and errors are made when it is copied. As a result, each human embryo contains 100 or more new mutations. Natural selection will eliminate the most harmful – those that kill the embryo, for instance. Most mutations make no difference because they occur in junk DNA, which makes up the vast majority of our genome. A few cause minor changes that are neither particularly harmful nor beneficial.

While most new neutral mutations die out, a few spread through later generations purely by chance. The odds of this happening are tiny, but the sheer number of mutations that arise make genetic drift a significant force. The smaller a population, the more powerful it is.

Population bottlenecks have the same effect. Imagine an island where most mice are plain but a few have stripes. If a volcanic eruption wipes out all the plain mice, striped mice will repopulate the island. It’s survival of the luckiest, not the fittest.

These processes have almost certainly played a big role in human evolution. Human populations were tiny until around 10,000 years ago, and genetic evidence suggests that we went through a major bottleneck around 2 million …